Hi All

I played a session or two of SR about 8 years ago and loved the setting. My group moved on to other things and eventually broke up. I am currently trying to drag them kicking and screaming back. I am a moderately skilled D&D DM, but know very little of the cyberpunk/SR world and I would be the GM of the group. Here are my problems.

1) Where ideas in starting to creating a SR mission/campaign? Would street level be easier or low level/new runners? I would like to set it in Seattle because I live a couple of hours away from there.

2) What are some good 1st missions to ease us old dogs (I'm among the younger at 38) back into RPG'ing?

3) Does 4th edition have any stats for awakened critters?

I guess my real concern is how to make missions that aren't repetitive and keep them interesting and fun for my players and myself. Any hints and ideas would be most welcome.

Thanks in advance for your help and be well!

p.s. expect lots of posts from me asking questions.

"On The Run" is highly spoken of as an introductory adventure for SR4 (good for introducing rules too) though I haven't read it or played it myself.

Starting at a lower power than the 'defualt' game is usually not a good idea, as game balance can easily be screwed up. You have to have a reasonable idea of how the game system works before you know which parts you can take away.

IMO you can reduce the BP totals to below the standard without messing up balance too much, if that's what you want. But that isn't really what I meant: 'street level' isn't just about the numbers, it's about the lifestyle, the opportunities, the kind of jobs you're pulling and the kind of nuyen you earn.

[pimpage] If you go to http://www.srrpg.com/missions/index.shtml you will find a bunch of runs designed for conventions that might give you some ideas for designing runs. You might also find some written for SR3 which might provide a jumping off point [/pimpage]

To be honest I'd stick with the character creation rules as they are in the book, or even just use the archetypes in the book to see how the different character elements impact on each other.

I think one of the big differences between SR and D&D as a GM is trying to keep the game balanced. In D&D you have the ever handy encounter ratings, but these just don't exist in SR. An unlucky die roll can drop even the biggest baddest runner faced with a simple mook.

I've not run On The Run (the only prewritten adventure so far released in print for SR4 that I'm aware of) but I have read it and I think it does a good job of introducing the elements of SR to a new group with plenty of handy dandy GMing tips.

This is a bit easier in SR4 than it was in previous editions because the probabilities are so much flatter. If you have access to your characters' sheets you can pretty quickly determine what an average result of a test will be. The character can expect 1 success per 3 dice. For example:

A character with 6 reaction, 4 body, and 8 armor will generally get 2 successes on a dodge test. If you want to hit hit you'll need 9 dice for the attacker, or multiple attacks to lower his dice pool. Once he gets hit he'll average 4 successes to soak. A base DV 5 weapon shot by a guy with 9 dice will do 1 box of damage on average.

Alternatively you could have 2 guys firing twice each with 6 dice. They'll average 2 successes on the first shot and 1.6 on the second. He'll average 2 (no damage), 1.6 (no damage), 1.3 (1 damage), and 1 (1 damage). So in a round of caombat he can be expected to take 2 boxes of damage.

Similar math can be done using their reaction + body armor against the gun users' dice pools. Magic vs. willpower and body is similar. For instance, if your caster generally uses mind control and is throwing 12 dice he'll average 4 successes. They'll need 12 dice of their own or some sort of other protection in order to successfully resist on average. That means you can pump the willpower and counterspelling to compensate and try to ensure they succeed. Alternatively you could add a few more guys: 1 to be mind controlled and 2 more to fight him (one dies, the other drops the controllee but suffers wounds enough to take him out of the fight.

It ain't perfect, but it's a lot better than trying to figure the same things out in prior versions of the game.

Another thing to have handy is dice pool modifiers like visibility and chemicals. If one side is overpowering the other too much some smoke grenades can quickly change that, especially if the side using the grenades has ultrasound and the other side doesn't. This works both ways in that security forces can use it to stall for time and save their butts while the runners can use it to open an escape opportunity and save their butts.

When I used to play D&D the wizard player used to complain about those spells, particularly Powerword Kill and Phantasmal Killer, but for a different reason. She never actually managed to inflict any damage with Phantasmal Killer as her victims always saved and her reason for disliking Powerword Kill was that by the time you reached a level where you could actually cast it everything you might want to kill would have more than 101 HPs.

Myself, I hated the magic system in D&D as I could never decide which spells to memorise or when to cast them. Hence I nearly always played a skills based character.

New D&D has a lot of spontaneous casters so you just figure out which spells you want to know and then cast them when you want to.

Power Word Kill and it's friends are best in a group setting. Let the fighters wail on that Balor for a couple of rounds and then hit it with a PW:K. They're also all pretty devestating against Slaad, who for some reason are the only group of powerful outsiders without spell resistance. I found that out much to my chagrin in an epic game when I thought that a white slaad would be a good chalenge for the party. Instead he just ended up dancing while he died because Otto's Irresistable Dance allows no save and he had no SR to protect him.

In the most recent campaign I played in our mage took on the role of artillery. She memorised every fireball, cloudkill and ice storm she had slots, saving one for fly. Then she flew to around a mile ahead and above an advancing army of barbarians and goblinoids and toasted the lot of them. by the time the rest of the party reached the combat zone (I think 10 or 15 rounds later) everything was dead and smashed into little tiny pieces.

Why didn't the army have any magical backup to retaliate with? Barbarian and goblin tribes would have priests and/or adepts, as well as perhaps a few sorcerers.

Nah... they were only shock troops. Plus our wizard was a mile high in the sky, well beyond range of arrows and stuff. She actually spent a while trying to establish the maximum range permissable before taking off and engaging at absolute maximum range.

I never really quite got what our GM was hoping to achieve with half his plotlines, but you had to almost hurl your character into harms way to even get hurt.

Huh. Interesting... Even for long range spells you'd have to be 120th level to cast something a mile away. I'm asuming you're exaggerating? At 20th level your medium range spells (cloudkill) cap at 300'.. Even if all they had were slings they could still fire at you, and every 20 would hit. The long range spells would still be within range of heavy crossbows. At anything less than 20th they'd be within range of long bows.

I guess I run mass armies different. My epic level players were afraid of armies after the first brigade of sorcerers hit the fighter with a huge swarm of magic missiles and killed him in one round. We used the Battlesystem rules though, which made single characters a lot more durable in a war. In a normal campaign any army should be able to utterly destroy any singal character they can both see and get within range of.

I've been accused of being an evil-GM though.

Fighter should have had Shield cast on him

But really, the evil GM is the one that makes non-sensical combat maneuvers simply to antagonize the players. Like the monster who is getting pounded on by melees but decides to totally disengage them to go for an easy kill on the rogue/wizard moving into position.

/knasser wanders off confused, looking for the Shadowrun boards...

Shield is personal only.

[QUOTE]My recomendation is to create a mystic adept with maxed stats, maxed skills, 5 essence worth of cyber and so many initiations that it doesn't matter, at least 1 level of every adept power in the book, and 4 PP left over for magic. Then, have his act like a total asshat and run out with his dikoted monofiliment-edged katana right into the middle of the team while screaming to give them ample advance warning. He might kill one runner before the others shoot hiim down but he will die. Then, show the players his sheet and tell them that if they could kill him so easily that they should imagine what Lone Star and the elite security forces can do to them if they act even half as stupid as him.[QUOTE]

I love it. This rocks!

a lot of it is tactics, its true. thats why doing your legwork is so very vital.

the trick is, one man's "stupid" is another man's genius. the difference is in how the GM interperts the world, and the people in it. a fair amount of stupidity comes from the fact that we are playing a game, and we want our character to do something 'cool'. we look at the dice, and it seems like it should work. statistics say its not a bad idea. and then... he runs out there guns blazing, to find just how random the dice really are.

heck, the charactes themselves watch the trid, and they see how shadowrunners are in the sims. they want to be like that! and not all of em have the brains to know better, but some have the skills to do some of those things with a chance of success.

in the end, it depends on what kind of game you want to run, cinematic or gritty? If you and your players want cinematic, then go for it. IF you want gritty, then try to make sure your players understand that. The worst thing you can do as a GM is to do things one way in one scene, and then the other way in the next. you need to have the world work one way consistantly.

Also check out page 69 of SR4, where it talks about specific rules tweaks that can be done for a cinematic campaign, a gritty campaign, etc. So if you have a certain style of gameplay in mind, these modifications can make it easier to do so.

Eventhough I am coming back to this post almost 5 years later (and have finally managed to get my group back to Shadowrun [1st session is Saturday]), I so totally love this. I absolutely have to use it.

I'm doing this next run.

One gripe I have with this demonstration - if it's done in game rather than just as an example - is that initiation takes time, patience and skill - a moron wouldn't live long enough to get that. I'd rather use the '6 million nuyen samouraï concept : some relatively average guy who gets packed to the gills with expensive cyberware and bioware and thinks he's superman an can take anything head-on an come out on top. Maybe someone inherited a crapload of money an decided to built himself the ultimate cyberwarrior and use him to settle all his childhood grudges...

Or if you still go for the adept, have a reason why he's acting that way (drugged, under some sort of spell, completely suicidal for some reason... pick something fitting to your game and players).